I thought that I would comment on the article that appeared in the Daily Mail last week regarding a businesswoman in South Wales saying how useless it was trying to find an employee through the Jobcentre. The article was making it sound as if the unemployed are better off than in work which we all know is not true and that a hundred applied for the job and none of them wanted it. Let's look at the statements made by the businesswoman. She said that the Jobcentre directed one hundred applicants to her but that is probably through the Universal Jobmatch website. I say that because it is very unlikely that a member of staff in a Glasgow jobcentre would suggest to someone to apply for a job in Swansea. Clearly when people are set targets and they have to apply for a minimum number of jobs a week they may have to waste the time of employers to avoid a sanction. The likelihood is that the one hundred applicants just clicked on the apply button and forwarded their CV's. That would mean that the jobcentre staff had nothing to do with directing applicants to the businesswoman and she also stated that none of the one hundred wanted the job. As she stated that she intended to interview seven of them then how would she know that the other ninety three didn't want the job. The rate of pay was £8 an hour and as South Wales is a low paid area of Britain that wage would have been very tempting for many and maybe she was looking for someone with more skills and experience for the warehouse packer job. As I live in Cardiff and the job was in Swansea I would probably have applied for it if I had seen it. Nowadays we have to apply for vacancies further than we normally would and as Swansea is only forty miles west of Cardiff it would have been a job that I would have been expected to apply for. If I had applied and been offered an interview I would have attended. The government are to blame for all this as they have forced people to sign up to Universal Jobmatch and made them apply for vacancies that are quite some way from where they live and would be difficult to get to using public transport. When people are applying for unskilled minimum wage jobs making them apply for jobs a long way away is absurd. The person in Glasgow who applied for the Swansea job was clearly being silly and if reported to the jobcentre could easily find themselves in trouble as it exceeds the ninety minute travelling time to a job and could come across as not wanting to work. Most people who apply for jobs using Universal Jobmatch know that around 95% are bogus and the CV's sent won't even be looked at. I will say this for the businesswoman in Swansea, the £8 an hour rate of pay for a warehouse packer in South Wales compares very well against the minimum wage and if she had a similar vacancy going in Cardiff on full time hours I would be happy to take it myself. It might seem a boring job but given the opportunity I would prove to be a very hard worker. I don't ask for much out of life and as I am getting old and past it basic mundane jobs are good as any others. When I did my first computer course in the early 1990s I was told that computers were the future. So many people have computer experience but sadly the unemployed don't have the opportunity to keep their skills up to scratch. On Thursday I have to attend the barriers to employment session at the Jobcentre, I will report back on here how it went.